The Earliest Medieval Hodge-Podge Recipes.

First page of an early copy of
Le viandier de Taillevent

Also in the series:

• A Medieval Hodge-Podge.
• The Earliest Medieval Hodge-Podge Recipes.
• Your Goose is Cooked! Medieval and Tudor Goose in a Hotche Pot.

The first hodge-podge recipes are found in manuscripts from the late 14^th and the 15^th centuries.  As I have pointed out in a previous article [“A Medieval Hodge-Podge”], the earliest recipe in England appears in the earliest known cookbook, the Forme of cury.  It was collated by the Magister Coquinae of the court of King Richard II.

The hospitality of Richard’s court is proverbial.  In the words of Richard Warner, author of the Antiquitates Culinariae:[1]

The prodigality of Richard was enormous. Two thousand cooks, and three hundred servitors were employed in his kitchen.—Ten thousand visitors daily attended his court, and went satisfied from his table. To furnish food for this numerous company, twenty-eight oxen, three hundred sheep, an incredible number of fowls, and all kinds of game, were slaughtered every morning.

While the numbers, here, are likely exaggerated, the vast size of Richard’s entertainments is repeatedly cited in historical records.

His master cook (Magister Coquinae) is thought to have compiled the Forme of cury around 1390.  In it we find the following recipe for “gees in ochepot”:

Nym and schald[2] hem wel, and hew hem wel in gobettys, al rawe, and seth hem in her owyn (own) grees, and cast thereto wyn or ale a cuppe ful, and myre (mince) onyons smal and do thereto; and boyle yt, and salt yt, and messe yt forthe.[3]

As we can see, hodge-podge had come a long way since its origin as the communal perpetual soup pot.

As it turns out, there was likely an earlier recipe in an earlier scroll known as Le viandier de Taillevent.[4]  Taillevent was the nickname of Guillaume Tirel: kitchen boy to Jeanne d'Évreux, wife of King Charles IV; cook in the kitchens of King Phillipe VI; Esquire of the kitchen to King Charles V; and master cook (“maistre queux du Roy nostre sire”) and otherwise head of the kitchen to Kings Charles V and VI. Taillevent last appears in the Royal account books in 1388,[5] making it likely that his recipe book was compiled at least by 1385.

In Le Viandier we find a recipe for “Hochepot de poullaille”:[6]

Metés par membres suffrire en sain de lart, broiés pain brullé et vos foies, deffaites de bouillon de buef, et metés bouillir aveques vostre grain; puis affinez fines espices deffaites de verjus; soit noir cler, et non pas trop.

Place the parts to fry in a bath of lard.  Grind toasted bread crumbs together with your livers, crumbling them into a beef bouillon.  Boil all of these together with your grain.  For the finishing touch add spices in crushed unripe grapes; the mixture should appear turbid, but not too much so.

This French version keeps the Anglo-Saxon name, Hotchpot, and keeps the main steps of the recipe exactly intact, while it departs from the recipe in several details.[7]  All of this suggests that this recipe was borrowed from the English at some earlier time.

The main steps in the written recipes we have are: 1)  cut and clean the pieces; 2) flash-fry the pieces; 3) cut the flash-fried pieces into “gobbets”; 4) place in a boiling pot of water together with vegetables and spices.  A second historical strain of hochepot skips the frying step and puts gobbets and vegetables straight into the boiling water.

“Gose in a Hogge pot,” being among the most common dishes of upper class tables, appears about 50 years later in the long recipe-poem Le Liber cure cocorum.[8]  The poem mentions another common step in Medieval English recipes:

And make a lyoure of brede and blode,

And lye hit [th]erwithe, for hit is gode;

Most recipes do not mention “lyoure” — thickener — and simply instruct the cook to fill a hard crust bread with the animals’ blood and cook it in the fire alongside the pot while the main course is boiling.  This was clearly a very popular ingredient/dish over centuries.

Hodge-Podge recipes would change considerably over centuries and regions for various reasons.  As the peasant classes began to have a bit better life they made their own variations on the dish which had been borrowed from their hovels in the first place, many centuries before.  They, too, could now afford to add cheap cuts of meat to their pot.  Often they were forbidden the better cuts by their landlords.  The key point, however, remained to eat a cheap and tasty meal.

The French peasants’ meatless stew kept the name “pot-pourri” over many centuries.  In Spain it was called “olla putrida”.  The dish “gallimaufry” is often stated to be synonymous with hodge-podge but the historical record suggests otherwise.  More about that soon.

Casting our gaze backwards in time for a moment, the English Heritage YouTube site offers a short video of a hodge-podge being prepared for a Battle of Hastings reenactment.  It seems eminently reasonable to think the upper-class hodge-podges with meat began in the Anglo-Saxon period.  And we may forgive the need to show only a small-pot version rather than cook to feed an actual army.

There are other problems, however, with the presentation.  A commenter praises the video for being realistic to the point of using purple carrots.  While the carrots in Medieval Europe, were indeed purple, they did not arrive on the continent in any color whatsoever until around the 14th century when they likely either arrived through the Islamic invasion of Spain or one of the early Crusades (or both).  Orange carrots are not in evidence until 17th century Holland where they appear to have been first bred.[9]

All of that said, here is the video:

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[1] Warner, Richard.  Antiquitates Culinariae; or Curious Tracts relating to the Culinary affairs of the Old English (1791).  xxxii.

[2] Nym and schald hem: “Take them [up] and scald them” in boiling water.  This could also mean scalding in a flame in order to burn off the tiny feathers left over from plucking.

[3] Ibid.,40.

[4] Pichon and Vicaire.  Le viandier de Guillaume Tirel dit Taillevent (1892). 

[5] Ibid.  XXVIII.

[6] Ibid., 9.  The word poullaille meant “poultry”.

[7]  Grains, however, are used instead of vegetables and the French style of preparing liver separately is already evident.

[8] Morris, Richard.  Le Liber cure cocorum (1862).  32.

[9] Denker, Joel S.  “The Carrot Purple”.  Vegetables Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking (2008).  “The peregrinating carrot left the Mediterranean and took root in Holland, France, and Germany during the 1300s. A century later, Flemish exiles fleeing persecution in Holland transplanted the vegetable to England.” 64.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Queen Elizabeth I’s Heart and the French Ambassador.  April 3, 2019.  “…the Queen of England, with the permission of her physicians, has been able to come out of her private chamber, she has permitted me… to see her…”
• Dietary Rules for Barnacles: Innocent III to Gordon Ramsey.  March 4, 2019.  “The Barnacle was a marvel of God, a confusion to those in authority in such matters.  Their people turned to them for clarification.”
• Shakespeare’s Barnacles.  March 3, 2016.  “Prospero will wake, he fears, before they can murder him, and will cast a spell on them.”
• The King's Esnecce.  January 13, 2019.  “It comes as no surprise, then, that when Maud’s son, Henry Plantagenet, Count or Duke of most of the western territories of France, and, by terms of the treaty, heir to Stephen, next rose to the throne as Henry II, he was quick to arrange for the safest possible means of transit across the channel.”
• Check out the Medieval Topics Article Index for many more articles about this fascinating time.
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time.